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Saturday, February 11, 2012

The Depths of the Hard Drive

Over the past four months I have taken just under 8,000 photographs. That is roughly 2,000 photos per month, 66 photos per day and 2.75 photos per hour. I take those photos and upload them to my Mac. I delete some of the ones that I don't like but I keep the majority (blame that hoarder part of myself). The photos I really like I edit and save in a separate file for my blog. So when I opened my slowing computer today and saw the large number of photographs in Lightroom (my editing software) I knew I had to clean it up a bit. The process makes me nervous since last year I accidentally deleted over 5,000 photographs from my computer, PERMANENTLY. I was heartbroken. I lost special events and moments of time. So I proceeded with caution and as I was working I thought the process would be easy. Highlight photos in folders, export to dvd, repeat. Six disks and four hours later the photos are saved to the disks and deleted from Lightroom. However, I had this sinking feeling the work was not done. I started looking into the hard drive of my computer and found THOUSANDS of original jpeg photos. I wanted to cry. I thought they were gone, but they are saved not only on the editing software but deep within the depths of the hard drive. It took another few hours to delete and clean. I am still not sure they are completely gone.

I was laying in bed when the analogy of my computer popped into my head as symbolic of my life. We try and clean out the surface junk in our heads from time to time, the things we see that we know we need to get rid of to help us move more efficiently. But there are the deep down files, the files embedded in the soul of our hard drive that are slowing us down that we forget are there or we are too tired or scared to look for. If we do not clean out those files we will continue to move slowly no matter how organized our surface editing software is.

I will say my internal hard drive is not completely cleaned out, but I have deleted a bunch of files I no longer need to help me operate more efficiently, peacefully. It is a very good start.

Love & Light,

Stacy

Nolan at the monument.

This is where Brian and I went to graduate school. We showed the boys, they were unimpressed.

The Lion King is here in Richmond! We saw in in NYC when I was pregnant with Cole. Very cool.

Nolan's FIRST play date from school that does not include his brother or his brother's friends. They were hilarious. I have a feeling this little boy will be a good buddy for years to come.